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NGINX 1.2.0 stable update improves proxy support

The NGINX developers have released the latest stable version of their open source web server. The NGINX web server is designed to be a stable, high-performance alternative to more established applications such as the Apache HTTP Server and Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services). The web server, originally written by Russian developer Igor Sysoev, has enjoyed increasing uptake over the last few years and is now deployed on a sizeable chunk of the web's most popular web sites.

Version 1.2.0 introduces improvements in HTTP Proxy support with the re-use of keepalive connections to upstream servers, consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests, more flexible configuration options for the DNS resolver, proxy redirects, headers and cookie manipulation, and improved load balancing. Performance has also been enhanced with PCRE JIT-optimised regular expressions, reduced memory consumption for long-lived or TLS/SSL connections, and better I/O handing to disk and on the network and cache data management optimisation. Security enhancements include new HTTP byte-range limits, more flexible connections and request throttling configuration, and new filesystem security controls.

For those who track NGINX development releases, the final changes from the last development version 1.1.19 to NGINX 1.2.0 fixes a segmentation fault that appears under certain circumstances in the latest development version of the software when a worker process uses the try_files directive. The new version also solves two problems with truncated server responses and with the crop functionality of the image_filter directive.

Future plans for NGINX 1.3 include support for Google's SPDY and WebSockets, and clean-ups of the IPv6 and upstream code.

More information on the changes can be found in the official changelog. NGINX 1.2.0 is available to download for Windows and Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian), and source code is made available under a 2-clause BSD licence.